Ashley Hackshaw, Author at Ashley Hackshaw / Lil Blue Boo

The Sky is Falling

September 9, 2014 by Ashley Hackshaw

Today I tried a new table down by the river and I checked underneath like I always do before climbing on top….and there was the largest spider I’d ever seen. She was upside down on the table, her egg sac carefully wrapped up in her web, and hundreds of little babies were swarming about. Charlotte is very ill. She only has a short time to live. Instead of chasing her away I found my usual table.

The sweat bee came back from a few days ago and brought all of her friends. Swarming they began to take over my personal space and eventually I moved to the bright red picnic table under the walnut tree. Butternuts were falling like bombs around me. I was a sitting duck. One of these would have probably knocked me out:

A man approached me and asked if my truck was for sale. I told him no. He told me he lived on the Cherokee reservation nearby, and then he told me his life story. Which I thought was awesome….I didn’t even have to ask any questions for once. His brother and his dog sat near his truck and waited for him to finish talking and eventually I mentioned that to him. He told me his brother was scared of him. As he left I told him to please be nice to his brother…and he hung his head a little as if he felt guilty all the sudden.

Yesterday I spent the afternoon working in the used book store…and the most important thing I learned is that it is not:

Used Bookstore

but

Used Book Store

Details, shmetails. Until it clicked and I realized we weren’t selling used bookstores. Obviously in my last post about the book store I didn’t know this difference. I never did that well in English. After that very important lesson, I spent my time going through 8 boxes of books brought in by the same elderly man. You can tell a lot about someone by the books they read. I think this man must have been a professor once, of history or philosophy….or anthropology.

I saw this rainbow as I drove home last night driving home from the bookstore:

It doesn’t even look real. When I took it I thought: no one will believe this is real.

Where the River Meets the Lake

September 6, 2014 by Ashley Hackshaw

I found where the river meets the lake yesterday. Well, actually a friend took Brett and I there. But still, where the river meets the lake. The mouth. The basin. The convergence. All of the roaring and tumbling ends almost instantly. It’s like it just runs out of steam.

Our friend Ben from Bryson City Outdoors took us out, dropped off the boards, and gave us a quick paddle boarding lesson before we set out on the lake. I did not take my phone with me…this was taken with a Go Pro (a waterproof one):

As we paddled we stumbled upon old Hwy 28. The water is low enough right now that you can see the top of the bridge. Brett paddled through it….I stayed back. Reminds me of What lies Beneath…or the end of the world….what it would be like if we all just disappeared one day. These mountains do tend to emit the feeling of ancient-ness. (You can read about what’s underneath the lake here).

As we paddled back towards the boat ramp, from a distance, we saw another truck pull up. Two men backed a truck and boat down the ramp. They took off to the other side of the lake creating huge wake. I waved to them and they hesitantly waved back. And then we realized why:

Brett: They took my shoes.
Me: What? I’m paddling over to them to ask for them back.

He wouldn’t let me.

Me: He has a Jesus fish on the back of his truck. Maybe he actually has a conscience…

I decided to leave a note on the man’s truck instead. I didn’t accuse him directly, just said if he found a pair of shoes could he please leave them at our church. God Bless. Hubby is unemployed. Hope you found some fish. Etc. I signed it something like: from someone who refuses to lose faith in the kindness of humanity. It just didn’t seem worth more trouble than that.

Me: Desperate people do desperate things.
Brett: I’m over it….he probably needed the shoes more than I did.
Me: You are barefoot.

And the truth is that we had just had such a wonderful time on the lake, not even stolen shoes could have put a damper on it.

I’m sorry fisher-man. This is where the river meets the lake. And we came here on purpose. It’s the lowest spot. You can’t take us any lower.

When I placed the note under his windshield wiper, I realized that I’d written the note on the back of one of Boo’s Sunday school drawings: a large heart with the words “God is Love” written in dainty little letters. I chuckled at the not-so-subtle message I was leaving him. Who knows….maybe the shoes will turn up. Maybe not. The most awesome thing in the world is that no one can steal my peace and joy from me. And I take all these little snapshots to remind me of that going forward because life has those peaks and valleys.

Late last night, after sending out my Dear Friend letter, I finished watching The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. I had watched it over a period of two consecutive nights. A beautiful film and so well done I felt myself in Jean-Do’s claustrophobic diving bell throughout every scene. My eye began to hurt as I watched him blink out the letters to his manuscript and I vowed I would never forget it for the rest of eternity (or at least for the next day). A powerful film that I recommend highly. Subtitle alert. But Jean-Dominique Bauby’s situation was an extreme one, but so many able-bodied people are caught under that Plath-like bell jar. I know sometimes it may sound like I’m trying to sell life to you….because I am. Buy into life. Life. Love. God is love. Love your life. Be kind. Do stuff. Let your soul breathe it all in…deeply. And it’s all your story. Her-story. His-story. History. And history:

It is the centuries of systematic explorations of the riddle of death, with a view to overcoming death. That’s why people discover mathematical infinity and electromagnetic waves, that’s why they write symphonies. Now, you can’t advance in this direction without a certain faith. You can’t make such discoveries without spiritual equipment. And the basic elements of this equipment are in the Gospels. What are they? To begin with, love of one’s neighbor, which is the supreme form of vital energy. Once it fills the heart of man it has to overflow and spend itself. And then the two basic ideals of modern man—without them he is unthinkable—the idea of free personality and the idea of life as sacrifice.
– Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago

Oh, and I forgot to tell you: this summer I found the beginning of a river. When we hiked Mt. LeConte: This is where the river begins. It’s being born. The mist begins to condense onto the vegetation and then it begins to drip and then a trickle turns into a stream. As it’s filtered through moss and rock it gets funneled into tiny waterfalls across the trail…which eventually compound into the larger streams below. I imagine that all the veins eventually begin to find each other until they have enough water to form a creek, and the creeks eventually merge into rivers. The water always hurries along, finding it’s way to the lowest point. A very humble trait of water.

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Something I Read in a Book

September 4, 2014 by Ashley Hackshaw

Sometimes I wonder about my life. I lead a small life – well, valuable, but small – and sometimes I wonder, do I do it because I like it, or because I haven’t been brave? So much of what I see reminds me of something I read in a book, when shouldn’t it be the other way around? I don’t really want an answer. I just want to send this cosmic question out into the void. So good night, dear void. -Kathleen Kelly, You’ve Got Mail

Today was my first day volunteering at the Friends of the Marianna Black Library store in downtown Bryson City. It’s a used bookstore that benefits the local library. I’ve always wanted to work at a bookstore, especially after watching You’ve Got Mail, Notting Hill and The Neverending Story. Today was really just a training day and I learned how to use a cash register again (it’s been probably 15 years since I used one). I rang up 2 customers. One of those customers was me…because I bought 6 books on my first day.

Friends of MBL (located right next to Cork & Bean)

Speaking of The Neverending Story…I watched that last night. It was just kinda weird, nothing like I remembered it. Falcor wasn’t the cute doggy dragon I remembered, Atreyu yelled way too much, and the Swamp of Sadness was just a big swamp of sadness. Sometimes childhood movies should not be revisited. But the whole idea of being lost in a book…well I love that. I’ve tried to set aside at least an hour a day now just for reading, and then I write. I sat by the river this morning and read a book as I drank a Grape Fanta:

If you have never spent whole afternoons with burning ears and rumpled hair, forgetting the world around you over a book, forgetting cold and hunger–

If you have never read secretly under the bedclothes with a flashlight, because your father or mother or some other well-meaning person has switched off the lamp on the plausible ground that it was time to sleep because you had to get up so early–

If you have never wept bitter tears because a wonderful story has come to an end and you must take your leave of the characters with whom you have shared so many adventures, whom you have loved and admired, for whom you have hoped and feared, and without whose company life seems empty and meaningless–

If such things have not been part of your own experience, you probably won’t understand what Bastian did next.

-Michael Ende, The Neverending Story

That quote reminds me of when I read my last Steinbeck novel…I cried closing the last page, because I knew it was the end and no more would ever be written. Or when I read Katherine’s Graham’s Personal History…and I got to the scene in the middle of the book about her husband’s death…I had to close the book and put it away for over a year before I could read the rest. And Sylvia Plath’s Unabridged Journals I’ve read so many times the pages are falling out…and some journals are missing because they were either destroyed or lost and that drives me cuckoo. And when I read them it’s like she’s reading my mind. And so on and so on. And then there’s the whole appeal of a used book…especially the old and tattered ones. There’s something very mysterious about them, there’s something very mysterious about used bookstores in general…especially when they are in the setting of an old historic building, with the original soda fountain stools from years ago. And the treasure hunt! A very young couple today came in looking for Steinbeck. They were staying in the Yurt village for a few days up at the Nantahala Gorge. I loved hearing about their experience in a Yurt. And that all created a flashback to when I once studied Chinese movies in college and we watched Mongolian movies….everyone lived in Yurts. Mongolia may have invented the Yurt. Someone asked me the other day about daydreaming….how I manage to do it. Learn to lose yourself in books first, then the daydreaming comes easily after that…

…and it could be really awesome in a Yurt.